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entreDonovan women’s custom clothing

entreDonovan is a multi-channel retailer offering custom and ready-to-wear clothing for professional women. Custom clothing is our differentiator. Technology is how we’re making it repeatable and scalable.

We’re passionate about bringing women great-fitting, high-quality career clothing at accessible prices. We use technologies such as a body scanner to measure and an e-style image consultation tool to offer style suggestions specific to the client’s body shape and size. Our use of technology won us a national grand prize from ComcastBusiness last summer. Now we’re ready to upgrade our body scanner and add new functionality to improve the experience for our clients.

The men’s custom clothing market is well-developed, serving men in shops, at their offices, and online. A number of menswear companies are already successfully using body scanners to collect measurements and make garments. Yet custom options for women barely exist and, to date, we’re the only ones in America using a body scanner to produce custom career clothing for women. (Hint: Women’s is harder.)

This campaign will help us license new body scanning technology and front-end software, and buy related hardware. Benefits of the technology will be five-fold:

Reduce time spent collecting a client’s measurements from an hour to about 10 minutes

Cut in half the time spent analyzing measurements to create an order

Automate ordering and other functions, reducing possibility of error

More accurate scan results = better-fitting garments produced more quickly and with fewer alterations

Once the process is repeatable, outbound sales consultants can bring our solution to more women — across the region and even across the country.

Proceeds of the campaign will cover about half of the expected $45,000 project cost. Based on our current sales run rate and the addition of only 3 outbound sales consultants, we project an estimated payback period of less than 1 year.

entreDonovan is 100% women-owned and is dedicated solely to serving women. We understand that women need to convey confidence, authority, competence and other attributes to be successful in their careers — and that’s a difficult feat while wearing ill-fitting clothing.

Linda Farquhar, founder of entreDonovan, had long recognized a void in the market for great-fitting, high-quality career clothing at accessible prices. Four years ago, she left a successful career in investment research to address that under-served niche. The goal was to take an industry that was traditionally constrained by labor-intensive, one-to-one (client and dressmaker) interactions, and build in technology to make it scalable, eventually serving women across America.

Early on, Linda sought out body scanning companies and volunteered to test the emerging technology. After a year in beta test with one vendor, we signed a license for the technology last April and became the first company in America using body scanning to produce custom career clothing for women. We believe we’re still alone in that pursuit.

After an 8-month run in a pop-up shop in the prestigious Hotel DuPont, our first permanent boutique opened in downtown Wilmington in March 2014. This year, Delaware Today readers voted us Best of Delaware (Upstate) for Women’s Business Clothes.

We’re not just about the clothes, though. We know our clients are busy women so we offer a client “registration” service. Clients’ measurements and preferences can be registered with us so they can call on us as their trusted wardrobe resource — their Wardrobe Concierge — serving them whether they can get in to the boutique or not. Killer service is the icing on the cake.

Please support our campaign so we can upgrade our technology and accelerate the process of bringing great fitting career wardrobes to women across the country.